Knowing what industry best practice looks like should help guide you to making better decisions about how much you spend.

To help see how your recruitment firm stacks up, we asked RIBreport to breakdown the operational costs for the two most common recruitment firm sizes in Australia. Here’s what the data shows over the past five years.

5 year operational costs for staffing firm with a team size up to 10:

75% to 80% of gross profit is average

63% to 68% of gross profit is where the top 25% of staffing firms sit

53% to 58% of gross profit is where the top 10% of staffing firms sit

5 year operational costs of staffing firm with a team size of 11 to 20:

80% to 85% of the gross profit is Average

68% to 73% of the gross profit is where the top 25% of staffing firms sit

58% to 63% of the gross profit is where the top 10% of staffing firms sit

The above chart provides an insight into expenditure throughout 2016

What happens if you don’t keep your costs in check?

It’s no secret that cost is a major concern for a growing company, and in the world of recruitment the cost is often in place well before your sales start to rise.

One of the reasons for growing a recruitment firm is to find economies of scale, so that operational business expense be dispersed over more sales and gross profit while profit increases. However, according to RIBreport data, this rarely happens. And, in fact, quite often the firm’s efficiencies deteriorate as they grow.

What’s more, poor expenditure habits which may be inherent in your business place greater pressure on your cash flow. And, without cash flow you can’t grow your business.

Top 3 areas where you can save

RIBreport and APositive agree there are three main areas where recruitment firms can tighten their purse strings, regardless of team size:

Marketing – you should spend less than four per cent of your gross profit/net fee

Occupancy – you should spend less than six per cent of your gross profit/net fee

Management and staff – you should spend less than 50 per cent of your gross profit/net fee

Find out how you can free up more cash flow with APositive, and keep track of independent industry trends with RIBreport.